FINAL PRESENTATION

Course: History

When most of people are thinking about Jade imagine a bright green material that we commonly
see in jewelry, but the Chinese jade tends not to be that bright Green material, it tends to be
darker or subtler colors.

The Freer Gallery of Art possesses one of the largest collections of ancient shades from the Liang
culture that we now call Liangzhou. The culture is named after its first discovery site Neal
Hangzhou which is essentially the west of shanghai. These discs are essentially round flat
doughnuts. They must have created from in general nephrite which is a specific kind of jade
substance. These jades must have been clearly important to the society that created them.
They’re found in Chinese tombs elite burials, often in large number: the ongoing mystery is
exactly why they were made and why they were put in tombs.

Some scientists speculate that the shape of the B side was chosen because they learned how to
carve that shape rotating tools a turntable, didn’t they? Or some type of mechanical device to
rotate the jade. We have a lot of ideas about how Jades were carved and we are quite sure they
were largely carved with mineral abrasives so through the abrasive process of rubbing the
surface of the jade one way or another, whether it’s sawing or creating a drill hole. Mineral
braces would have been used because no tools would have been available during the Neolithic
period.

Clearly it was not made by average people, was it? These were highly trained artisans who were
responsible for making these objects. The material itself is rare notoriously fragile, so that
creation of these objects in nephrite represents a great expenditure of social wealth at the time.

Whenever jade objects come into the laboratory for investigation, the first thing scientists did
is studying it visually under a microscope, the curator who usually would like to know the mineral
composition of the object. They must have used techniques such as an x-ray diffraction and
Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy to analyze the jade material. It revealed evidence of
manufacturing to learn how the object was made, that includes looking at the overall shape and
form of the object and look with more detail at the tool marks left on the surface of the jade.

As soon as of the development of archaeology in china and the great interest in Liangzhou
culture it’s encouraged us here at the museum to use our collection of some 125 objects as a
kind of sample to improve our understanding of the carving techniques of this ancient culture.